Dead World (by Paul J. Ennis)
by rsbakker
What’s it like to really give up on philosophy? I don’t mean to give up on a specific brand of philosophy or even to tune out and churn out something akin to it. I mean embracing the knowledge that philosophy is no longer worth doing. I can only answer with a response I would have chastised a student for saying: I can only speak for myself. At some point I came to fully own up to the impossibility that I might work something out about this world that was positive. That I might find a niche in philosophy that I could latch onto and develop, bit by bit. Maybe it might even impress someone at a conference (assuming anyone would even be listening at a conference, they never are). All I really learned from philosophy is that it is very unlikely a bunch of people might reason their way toward an understanding of how it goes with the world. Except in that quirky round-about way where philosophy demonstrates the limitations of reasoning stripped of any lead. You need a bit of lead to weigh things down. But what happens when you realise you could just describe the lead and leave it at that?
If philosophy has a bunch of questions it grapples with perhaps the only decent one left is consciousness. It’s got this edge that apparently makes it resistant to reduction to neurobiological processes such that, contrary to everything we know about reality, it is somehow distinct from nature. Now, there is an entire botnet of thinkers that will, for a fee, find a way to say ‘well it’s both in nature and distinct from it,’ but better them than me. It’s a lot of fuss with little reward. Unless you really think future generations are going to care that you defended the Real or objects or invented the future, all positions currently on offer at discounted prices. My point is that philosophy is not just weird, but doing it is weirder. Even better it has some hilariously entertaining group dynamics. Philosophy is a discipline where you can have a guy defending the necessity of diversity whilst railing against another group doing the exact same. The kind of place where one bully shouts over another about just how damned intolerant the other fellow is. Lots of fellows too. The kind of discipline, to be sure, where men will chastise other men for how their group of men has too many men.
Since there is no common ground anymore, outside the mainstays of security and other mundane issues, we end up with little more than a situation of jockeying for status. Assuming, that is, one is comfortable enough to do so. There are marginalised groups everywhere, but unless you’ve just decided to volunteer or something, I’m going to take the oh-so-bold wager you are mostly in it so that others now you are a really good guy. Or, on the flipside, a rogue. Either way it’s ugly. Whether it’s wilful intellectual censorship or calculated trolling it’s mostly a clamour for the goods. ‘Life is a war of all against all,’ as the eminently reasonable Hobbes once said. That’s not a bad place to start from. Why? Because it’s honest. It has a ring of truth to it. We organise ourselves for peace, security, and the path of least resistance. In doing so we operate from a suite of facts, of how it goes with the world, and find niches where we might take on a few adventures, like improving our lot. And if this sounds like what you say when with friends that’s because it’s the one group you don’t lie so often to.
I think that’s more or less what consciousness looks at when viewed without romance. As ultra-sophisticated animals we have evolved in a certain direction. There’s a lot in there about just getting on and, indeed, getting along through empathy. This is not entirely neat. Empathy is limited, associated with bonds and kinship often, and it flows into protection. And we know all this exists at least partially because of the threat of others humans and their groups. Even in our own groups the pact is partially rooted in the knowledge that there is a violent streak in us. I say partially because I’m appeasing. Because I don’t want those who dislike such readings to be upset. I’m signalling I’m not so bad. The things we learned and shared were also, and here is a word I know other groups will dislike, arrived at through trade. Our cultural evolution is intimately bound up with the traders who moved between the semi-settled and the settled. Information, tactics, methods, goods, means and ends. Traded. Enough that trade, alongside the embodied sovereign interests we call nations, are intrinsic to our species.
If capitalism is evil then so too are humans. Capitalism is such a clear-eyed ordering of how we are in the world it is no wonder that it no longer has any serious competitors (this, in itself, was always a game of some players at the table operating with one hand tied behind their backs). It captures our mixed feelings about being here at all. It offers the possibility, no matter how remote, of generating a social force field known as wealth. It includes in the chase for that risk. And also every grimy, awful aspect of what our species will do when reward is high enough. It is so essential that those who manage to truly move beyond it take on a holy sheen. It can even present you with the vilest caricature of a human and make you ponder what you would do in their shoes. Most important of all, it’s nothing more than a powerful idea. Like its chief representative, fiat currency, it’s a cognitive agreement. This is worth something and it is worth something because that’s the agreed upon organisational field one is in. But this organisational field is not arbitrary. It’s an expression of what humans need to function. It came about because it worked. Not from the ether.
It worked. Humans and heuristics, peas in a pod. The thing about heuristics is that when you try to grapple with them you are trying to retroactively explain something your brain pushed toward for ends that may not have been all that clear during the push. But that is how we have tended to make discoveries. We do first and fail. Eat berries and die. Try again, well someone else alive would, and live. Then as time passes, not even deep time mind, it seems it has always been so. Since we are especially good at this we might even seem special, bearing an almost supernatural ability to adapt, except, of course, it only looks this way because most of the time we have very limited information about what is going on. Leaving aside the very natural deceptions humans practise as they go about their business there is the much weirder structural fact that the brain, as Bakker has shown, is pretty good at hiding information about its own operations from…well, itself, or us, or whatever tangle of words you prefer.
Heuristically it’s better not to know too much. As is well known it is easier to do something when you are not thinking too much about it than it is when you do. Consider that for a moment. Although we value reason as one of our highest virtues when it comes to doing something it’s best not to think about it too much. You can practise, get better, learn, be trained, and so on, but ultimately your ambition is to perform the action without cognition throwing you off. Now, let’s apply this to self-reflection. By its very nature self-reflection, since it involves thinking too much about something (in this case, thinking), is bound to be tricky. Humans, nonetheless, have engaged in this practise for quite a while. We celebrate Socrates precisely for his ability to force others to trip over themselves as they try. Unless you are Nietzsche and you call this out as ugly. Famously, this two-thousand year old practise has yielded pretty much no clues about the true nature of consciousness. Indeed, the only reason that sentence even matters is because almost every other discipline philosophy concerned itself with, with the exception of maybe ethics, is now analysed by specialists elsewhere. No wonder philosophers are so precious about it.
Previous because nobody likes to have spent a long time working on some thinker or another and then have to admit they have learned very little beyond a few historical curios. That’s pretty much the state of play in any contemporary philosophy department. Ashen-faced at thirty and defending a tiny set of ideas to maybe thirty other specialists across the entire planet the overworked philosophy academic has basically ceased original production in favour of the repetition of a few notes they know by heart. On this score I’m not even railing against those who at least keep zipping around searching. Rather, what stuns me, and I’m not stunned easily these days, is how someone in a discipline dedicated to dropping bad ideas when faced with better ones spends their entire time building defences to ensure they never have to.
Years and years ago at some god-awful leftist event someone told me that Trotsky had said something like, ‘imagine all the Aristotles that have gone unnoticed amongst the working class?’ I’ve always liked this quote, but I guess my point is imagine all the Aristotles that have been lost to organised philosophy (and yes, I do want you to make that association)? I’m going to stop here because, as Nick Land once said, concluding is ugly.
Three Pound Brain 
and the vexing thing, pauly, is that we can never break free of it. we go from dogmatic, to critique, to sociology of knowledge, sociology of philosophy, science of philosophy, round and round the recursive loop. look at the anthony jack paper on conceptual dualism. i almost think he gives a neurology of why some people are gravitated to philosophy. he vindicates cleckly’s old description of psychopaths by describing it that their brains just dont spontaneously have strong autonomous activations of the circuitry that underwrites pure social metacognitive thinking, thus blocking them from thinking in terms of the quality of experience, or in his philosopher terms they are impoverished in “phenomenal stance”.
Nations intrinsic to our species? Definitely stop doing philosophy right now! You need some anthropology 😉 Maybe even History 101 would help? I would definitely contest the naturalisation of capitalism too (of course), but that’s a debate. The discussion about nationhood is just a correction of facts.
Good to hear this admission of philosophy’s futility. I’m just nagged by a feeling, a bit like Bill Hicks on non-smokers (‘I’d quit if I didn’t think I’d become one of them’). I’m like, ‘I’d reject philosophy completely if I didn’t think I’d just end up absorbed by the boorish ideological mainstream as a result.’
And yet the folks I know who have never tried to be professional philosophers still seem to yearn for wisdom nonetheless. They still talk about the world and politics and their minds and really all the classic big questions from time to time. They put things in terms of science fiction they like, or religion, or pop culture references that resonate with them, or personal experiences, maybe. They struggle for tools and idioms. But they are certainly engaging in the activity of philosophy. Philosophy as a “discipline” seems pretty messed up. Philosophy as an activity, or a yearning, seems as perennial as the dew. Maybe professionalism and disciplinarianism is not really the way to go here anymore … Cross-stitch was once a staple of upper-class femininity, virtually the profession of European noble women. It is still a thriving hobby. But no one thinks of it much as a profession anymore …
hey BPM, what makes something philosophy as opposed to just thinking about?
some degree of second order thinking. others might ask what exists,science posits things that exist all the time, where the philosophical question takes it reflexively: what is existence itself
div, to ask what is “existence” sounds like what Wittgenstein correctly diagnosed as a bewitchment by grammar, are you more getting after something like not getting caught up in the tyranny of our means?
We’re all amateur philosophers just as we’re all amateur psychologists and amateur physicists. I think this applies to Gyrus’ remark (“I’d reject philosophy completely…”) as well. We need theories regarding how the physical world works, how human beings work and how societies work in order to move through the natural, interpersonal and social worlds. I’d guess most of us learn those rules implicitly and I’d guess most of us could not articulate them. Human beings do yearn for wisdom (in the sense that Ben Cain used the term in the previous post and in his comments on the post before that), but Philosophy is no longer in the wisdom business (if it ever was). The “boorish ideological mainstream” is where most of us end up. To borrow Ben’s terms, most of us don’t have the testosterone to be alphas or the strength of will to be omegas, so we’re betas. We have philosophies we can’t articulate, nevermind justify, because we got them from Saturday (or Sunday) morning cartoons. I don’t think it could be otherwise.
Reads like yet another death-rattling noise piece from someone who is still so very pissed off with having their desire for Truth disrupted and now managing to get by knowing that all discourse is rhetorical and only as good as whatever we do with it.
Tell us something we don’t know muthafukker.
Fact remains that “philosophy” (within or outside the Cathedral) as the desire for wisdom-cultivation will always be more available and pertinent at an existential register. Thus philosophy will live on as long as their are cheeky hominids willing to fantasize about shit they know very little about, and ask questions that may not even relate to anything other than their own existenz translated through a given semantic heritage..
After ‘Tell us something we don’t know motherfukker’ you then go on to basically say the same thing as me. Which I suppose is something.
Hence the “something we don’t know”. I know it, you know it, but what are we to make of it, and for what ends? Nihilism yeah; but what are we going to do with this non-knowledge (Bataille) knowledge so hard won and darkly gleaned? Art? Onto-designing new sensibilities (via H+ moves)? What post-nihilistic strategies are available?
Michael- if by “we” in “Tell us something we don’t know motherfukker” you mean only Paul and you, then yes this post was pretty damn pointless. But have you considered the possibility that a lot of people doing and aspiring to do philosophy professionally don’t share Paul’s insights at all?
If the institution of philosophy has in effect turned into a fantasy preservation machine without ever admitting this fact to both outsiders and insiders, and if you don’t see a problem in that, then there’s really nothing more to say on this topic to you except perhaps to note that not everything in this world is written solely for your benefit.
“what are we to make of it, and for what ends?”
Frankly, how many professional academics even suspect “it” at all, or feel anything but reassurance that what they’re doing is a self-evidently worthy end in and of itself?
I’d echo Michael without the disingenuously playful invective. Or rather, I’d endorse the invective as itself the source of philosophy. There are people who ask about reality and go into the laboratory or go the route of high level mathematical abstractions, and there are those who work from the nihilistic constraints of Darwinian axioms and are happy to remain within more or less modest statements. The particular problem of the philosopher seems to be his fundamental autism. He doesn’t for a second even begin to understand the world. The world itself- or words like the Real or Being or what have you- are his problem because, holy shit, he hasn’t got a clue what it is or how to operate in it. Philosophy doesn’t begin in wonder or in disappointment or in the discovery of systematic error per se, it begins in the traumatic horror that I don’t know how to live- I’m a sick man, a maladjusted animal, I mean, look at the others, the millions of others, who seems perfectly content to get on with their lives without ever once really getting stuck on the question of consciousness. The philosopher is sick, damaged, wounded. And not in a romantic swooning way.
As others have said the problem is less with philosophical activity and more with philosophy as a distinct discipline. Whereas the others are happy to just assert this I’d be prepared to point to the resurgence of interest in Stoicism, Epicureanism and bullshit phenomena like London’s The School of Life as evidence. This might be linked to our historical moment as well. It’s hardly a stretch to say things are fucked up and that there are multiple collapses imminent and immanent. Minds- regardless of what they fucking are- are frayed to breaking. This is a time when ISIS is as seductive as Socrates and we’re all trying our best to keep up beat in the face of our own irrelevance and probably annihilation. The end of a cycle? The next stage? I’m sure there is a clever way to talk about it. We’d be just as well calling it what it is: self-induced catastrophe. We’re like the suicide who has jumped from the bridge and changes his mind on the way down. Too late- better make the fall pass more pleasantly, better survive while we plummet and plunge. So we see a resurgence again of that idea of philosophy as a way of life, we see the continued appeals to mysticism Western and Eastern, we see the religious fundamentalisms and their soothing solutions.
The same phenomena goes on in organized philosophy. If its annihilation and a more stark and unremitting lunacy we’re trying to avoid than the happy madness of everyday deludedness and self-deception, why the surprised regarding professional philosophers? Aren’t they also lunatics? Aren’t they also rocking back and forth repeating their “notes”- their mantras and self-affirmations (“every day in every way it is getting better and better”, as Ligotti said)- and so hoping to set up a psychotic defence against the dark arts of the world.
On another level I really admire the continuity of pessimist thought. Michael derides the disappointed deflation that you find in the preference to dispense with Truth. I see that as admirable. It is the same angry deflation that Schopenhauer expressed at those he considered pseudothinkers.
The ultimately futility of philosophy? Well, yes, of course. To draw on yet one more philosopher, one in some ways closest to the “philosophy as a way of life” school, isn’t it the case that
“All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure”
and this including professional philosophy. If I’m right in my personal depiction of philosophy as a kind of autistic safety behaviour, an addict’s compulsion that can be experienced with more or less severity, we should expect nothing less than failure, including, ultimately, the failure to really give up on philosophy. The death of “Philosophy” might even be necessary.
A compulsion is a compulsion with or without the romance, but the question is one of what comes of the compulsion absent the romance, isn’t it? Think of Dennett’s social irresponsibility charge levelled against neuroscientists declaring there was no such thing as free will, the idea that we undermine the important functionality of the deceptions to the degree we fail to take the ‘romance stance.’ How do you see this cashing itself out?
indeed, this “wisdom” nonsense as opposed to just trying to get/make our ways in the world (even if we don’t/can’t know what exactly that might be)…
Is this the age of the radically ersatz? That’s the way I see it. We’re all just whistlin’ whistlin’. To the degree the species needs recognizable meaning, and to the degree those hacks drive consumer behaviour, it will become hypercommodified.
not sure if we are more/less ersatz but yeah in all the ways that technologies extend our impacts beyond our control/grasps they will have consequences that amp up our destructive trends.
Less compulsion that a certain sub-set of coping mechanism maybe?
Dirk, “wisdom” being a compilation cognitive heuristics coded in discourse. Don’t piss on electric fences: wisdom. We tinkerers also collect and that stuff feeds back and can guide us in certain directions.
hey m, seems more like an honorific to me one with unfortunate Romantic resonances for most I think, no?
Michael, the coping mechanism, the coping being that humanity at root is and for which all activity is baseline the same thing, is a safety behaviour. We can cash this out in terms of addiction. We’re meaning addicts, substance addicts. This is Jung’s take on addiction and in it we see that we’re all substance junkies. In this view the coping mechanism is the safety behaviour that propels the trauma forward. Essentially we’re fucked. There is no way out of the nightmare. There are various rituals that can make the nightmare less nightmarish. And perhaps that includes the postnihilistic strategies of H+- although it might as well include the denial of the will to life in a great murdering of the species.
Scott- the charge of irresponsibility is wonderfully naïve in some respects. Our history is one of localised islands of peace in a general ocean of misery and bloodshed. Our responsibility has thus far been little more than an excuse to keep the meat thresher tearing shreds out of one another. Perhaps the best we can hope for is the tranquillity of a certain detachment from things. After all the morbid symptoms of the end of the (image of man in the) world are traumas, psychoses, depressions and anxieties- by what evaluative criteria are these in any way preferable to a full deracination? Of course the other option, the one that is more likely to come to the fore, which is indeed coming to the fore, is the embrace of a new wave of mysticisms.
In terms of a social-global cashing out we’re seeing all that leftist chatter about ‘inventing the future’- the truth of that project is a paternalism that will ultimately become require some revealing of hyperstitions as the self-selected psychosis of a rational elite. Essentially this path would require the reactivation of the noble lie.
Personally, at these moments, when faced with the question “how will this cash out”, I look at new fundamentalisms and think the question is already being answered. The ultimate avoidance strategy is to close our eyes to the truth and make believe it isn’t even there.
My hope- if that you can call it- is that we’ll just decide to bow out. We’re biding our time. We always were. All these dreams of salvation are just prolonging the inevitable. We’re in a palliative ward trying to get the patients into rehabilitation. It’s not going to happen.
The radically ersatz is a good name for it.
This is pretty damn close to my view. Chaos, or some kind of enforced hygiene. I actually consider Marvel blockbusters and fascistic fundamentalisms to be of a piece, the same will to meaning locked into different apparatuses.
“Marvel blockbusters and fascistic fundamentalisms to be of a piece”
A secret of the Marvel films is that the bad guys are good guys in disguise.
“Essentially this path would require the reactivation of the noble lie.”
well, lets knock this down a notch. its taken as a general sociological truth that integration into some kind of smooth behavioral protocols within an organization requires ‘internalizing’ some degree of its values, myths, stories, or narratives that legitimize it’s authority structure. why would the left be any different, here?
this sounds too much like outdated freudian models of “denial” where at some level a hard/traumatic truth registers and than some un-conscious function hides and or disguises it, but now we have a better sense via cog-biases that we are constantly pre-shaping/predicting and often the rough (or complex or future-oriented, etc) aspects never really register at all, not so much chaos than but more kluged/blinkered graspings at (relations with) the relatively stable material world of objects, this is why such matters of our occasional (or even nagging) anxieties can still be understood in terms of the uncanny which have some sense always of the familiar to them, the rub is that our tech-reaches/impacts have introduced titan-like complexities (in say environmental feedbackloops or stock markets) into our environs that vastly outstrip our evolutionary response-abilities.
It’s interesting that psychological denial is always an alternate diagnostic possibility when looking at things like anosognosia. But the former requires some kind of contact with what’s actually going on which I just don’t think applies here. Those bound up in (atavistic or commercial) fantasy worlds generally lack any cognitive sensitivity whatsoever to the processes engulfing them: they’re not ‘denying’ so much as following the path of least resistance.
“they’re not ‘denying’ so much as following the path of least resistance” sure, most “evolutionary” psychology is like the sort of bunk that passes as “social” psychology (abuses of terms like contagion) but actual studies of evolution seem central to any proper understanding for me at least.
I wish I had some fascistic PC’s in the D&D games I run. It’s like they always passive until they are told what to do – then they only try and rock the boat once put in a boat by someone else, just trying to be the naughty kids in the back row of the class.
Anything genuinely radical…well, one could say anything genuinely radical is fascistic as well, I guess. And go back to floating under the status quos fascism instead.
Another example, very close to Stoicism, even down to the “we’re not Vulcans”, is the behavioural economics as way of life (ie. as philosophy) of the Applied Rationality crowd. cf: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-code.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&action=click&contentCollection=magazine®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0
[…] This is a time when ISIS is as seductive as Socrates and we’re all trying our best to keep up beat in the face of our own irrelevance and probably annihilation. The end of a cycle? The next stage? I’m sure there is a clever way to talk about it. We’d be just as well calling it what it is: self-induced catastrophe. We’re like the suicide who has jumped from the bridge and changes his mind on the way down. Too late- better make the fall pass more pleasantly, better survive while we plummet and plunge. So we see a resurgence again of that idea of philosophy as a way of life, we see the continued appeals to mysticism Western and Eastern, we see the religious fundamentalisms and their soothing solutions. […]
Jeez, Empty vessel describing a nightmare – reminds me of the line in Crash Space ‘Something better, not for myself… of myself.’. I guess it goes along with all the people plucking and waxing off their pubes, as they can’t stand their curly, hairy selves. Just wait until they see how curly and hairy their minds/brains are!
What is this self loathing?
And wisdom is not ‘don’t piss on an electric fence’ (though Michael said that). Wisdom is self management – self medication, if you prefer. It’s grasping when you have an urge to piss everywhere and identifying that that urge is not always going to work out (electric fences). It’s the management of urges, it’s not doing actions/not doing actions in itself. It’s not the ‘not pissing on fences’. Indeed, to see it as just ‘not pissing on fences’ is to be the thing wisdom works upon and cut off from the process of that wisdom entirely.
So as much as there are people waxing off their pubes, is there just as much this other self loathing there, a ticking time bomb? People who are all reaction/urge in regards to their curly minds (because ‘it’s a fucking nightmare’), and dare I say it, are low wisdom/low self medicating in regards to their urges? Just boom, the urge goes off, no chance of interrupt? With a a Dunning/Kruger effect in regard to wisdom, papering it all over? “No, sure, everyone gets themselves – everyone has perfectly the same skill at mapping out their own urges!”
God damn addicts to avoiding being addicts.
On the main post, I wonder that if you philosophize about a certain activity, you might treat that as entertaining thoughts that defect from the usual practice of that activity. You might even say you betray the activity, by philosophizing about it. So if you take it that doing philosophy perse is to philosophize about philosophy…
And it just seems capitalist apologia (Gyrus argues the naturalisation as well). A philosopher with no sense of resource logistics – ie, the life support box he’s in, acting like his philosophy is thinking outside the box, while handwavingly/heuristically giving the thumb up to capitalism merely because he has no idea it works, it just works/keeps him alive, thus he gives it blessing. No hint of even theoretically biting the hand that feeds. Actually starts to make me angry – where’s the cut of your income to building an infrastructure from the ground up (not paying for another teat built onto capitalism) to support human life, beyond just keeping yourself afloat? Divide and conquer – just ignorance of how capitalism works acts as the divider it applies – with the philosophers blessing. It’s like watching the ‘Grand Designs’ TV show and having to imagine to myself that really the renovators featured give a cut of their income to supportive infrastructure for others – they don’t just build fucking expensive monuments to what would otherwise be their sleepy, complacently narcissistic selves (where every little gesture is an expression of how fucking wonderful they are). No, I tell myself, they give a cut. I tell this to my rising urge to strangle. But I didn’t switch to that program, so what would I know?
I think Scott’s spoke of this many times. When it comes down to it we construct little fictions, heuristics to help us get on with our work, whether that be modeling Einstein’s theory of relativity, or calculating the effects of neurons across the brain in livetime imaging, etc. If a heuristic fails we’ve discovered something real… the truth comes by way of error and failure more than success. We need our problems, out antagonisms, our contraditions: that’s what keeps us asking questions and solving problems. If anything philosophy has always been more about problems than anything else. For a few hundred years we’ve sidetracked it into competing with the sciences which was a bad mistake for philosophy. I mean how many times does Scott have to repeat that we are metacognitively deficient and blind. We keep punching words into the gap of our ignorance over and over as if this might actually work. It’s like a tinker-toy set without instructions, we build and build then tear it all down and start again thinking we’ll get it right next time, problem is there is not getting it right because it has there is no solution to infinity or absurd regressions. We’re recursive creatures who are stuck in a game or repetition, spinning around in a void that no one built and no one lives in. We think we exist and have identities when in fact we’re already dead, and empty of all content. Philosophy is like Yeats rag-and-bone-shop of the heart: the last gasp of a useless animal who once thought it was God’s handy-man on earth. The illusion of that illusion is up. No one is home, the generals and politicians and philosophers have all gone mad and bankrupt. Silence reigns everywhere even as the volume of noise increases.
But then again I read philosophy like I drink a nice glass of red wine, because it gives me pleasure, challenges my mind, makes me want to solve impossible puzzles. Will that actually do anything? Will it solve some ultimate truth? I doubt it. I mean look around at philosophy today: New Materialists (Vitalists); dialectical materialists (poets or mathematical idealists radicalized onto the Subject); speculative realists – puzzling words and tropes for abstract entities with strange relations; analyticals (get the statement right and things will take care of themselves); anti-realists (it’s all about language, didn’t you know – oh, lets deconstruct it, take it apart, somewhere in this circus of solipsism we’ll find a hole, an undecidable)… we could go on. Games and puzzles is what philosophy has come too… an academic parade full of charm and quaint notions, as Shakespeare: much ado about nothing…
Thing is philosophy will probably continue as long as humans do… but will it matter? Probably not. Even now most scientists are more pragmatist and hands-on, guided by heuristical apparatuses as tentative tools that can easily be replaced… the Mind Tools of sciences just like what they do are experimental, so are prone to a short life-span… no eternal verities here. Accept that which does not fail, that which we cannot break or disqualify… science is more about breaking things that can be broken, and finding here and there the singular thing that after long trial and effort remains and cannot be prove to fail… Only those things that last and do not fail can be of use… and, this is no utilitarian vice, either. Even when scientists try to bridge the gap and speak to us in the folk psychology of the mass mind they know its partially a fiction, because most of the sciences are done either in mathematical notation or in a more semantically controlled analytical form of statement under careful peer review. Obviously this fails at time because of power, politics, and the human condition, etc. But that’s the base line…
What Scott’s shown is that much of our touted thought is just one more grand fiction, and like the overabundant literatures of the world will slowly devolve into nominalistic chaos… Even those like Badiou, Zizek, and others striving to find their way back to some form of Universal, or the Sellars/Brandom/Brassier/Negarestani clan trying to enforce a new deontological ethic of Intelligence all seem on their last legs… Why? Think about it, when was the last time a philosopher came up with something new, a really new concept? I don’t mean things like Deleuze’s repetition of difference, or Zizek’s Void, or Badiou’s non-All, or a number of other trivial notions… almost all of these concepts were reworked tropes from pre-cursors… very few and far between since a philosopher who was totally original arose in our midst, one against which all the lesser lights measured themselves… we still go back to Plato and Aristotle, even if we are their enemies, Why? Because it is their ideas and concepts that still live… even if we invert them and abuse them. Name anyone since who has truly created a memorable thought…. Descartes’ shadow fall across Kant? Nietzsche? Heidegger? and a bundle more… most of his errors still raise the dead among us. But none of this matters much.
Billions of dollars are spent on NBIC technologies and related sciences…. How much on philosophy? Should this matter? If philosophy was a priority shouldn’t we be spending as much on it as we do on the Hadron Colliders?
Sorry too man typos… dang!
Added an extended post on medial neglect that is Scott’s essential concept along with more current discussion of this battle between the sciences and philosophy of neurosciences etc.: https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/r-scott-bakker-medial-neglect-and-black-boxes/
I’ll definitely check this out!
Just playing catch up here… This is a wonderful characterization of the dilemma. The only thing I would add to this is the ‘post-posterity’ nature of our present juncture. This is the big reason I see the intentional tradition as being obscurantist and apologetic rather than obscurantist and critical: we no longer have the luxury of arguing angels on pinheads. The worst case scenario is materializing before our eyes, and yet still only a handful of souls have committed themselves to exploring it in its own terms. Everyone–the vast bulk of scholarship–is devoted to rationalizing why this or that traditional conceit simply has to be the exception.
This is insane.
If anything what I’m trying to do it push it to the limit, radicalize it and see how it self-implodes and opens itself up to that post-posterity of the inhuman machinic future heading our way at such an accelerating pace… maybe a nostalgic swan song for the Intentional Age as it casts off the last vestiges of its secular angels…
So we are crossing/have crossed the Rubicon and discovered that all meaning is illusion. You can’t remove meaning from the human animal but there is no truth only fact. How do we square that circle?
How can we embrace the apocalypse without succumbing to the obvious existential implications?
I think this is where Ben’s ideas on the creation of (personal) fictions in order to live authentically meaningful lives have some practical use.
Why would that be ‘authentic’?
I could understand it being described as ‘ablative’, ala body armour.That’s probably both where I see benefits to Ben’s ideas but at the same time, divide from him.
I agree with the notion that something has to be done to adapt, I just don’t think Ben’s brand of conceptual atavism will do the trick. Rather than trying to salvage the old tools, I think we need to invent new ones, and that we need to do so remaining clear-eyed about what it is we’re building, and what it is we want to achieve. To do this, I think, we need to explicitly look at the project in terms of heuristics and ecologies, adopting an experimental mindset. Rather than looking at it in terms of some kind of self-actualization (which Ben gravitates toward), we need to look at it in terms of coping, palliatives and ameliorations, not so much a matter of finding ‘quasi-meaning’ as a matter of getting by.
yep making our blinkered ways in/of the world, not pretending to make up whole worlds (unless we happen to be fiction writers)….
I think late modern philosophy and fundamentalist religion are in a similar predicament. Both are scientistic in that they presuppose scientific standards of success when it comes to evaluating their own output. Just as real Republicans would be “better” than Republican Lites (e.g. centrist Democrats like Obama or Bill or Hillary Clinton), given a Republican standard of “success” (which standard would be tantamount to the anarchist’s plan for politics), science is naturally going to be better at doing science than is religion or more artistic reason (philosophical speculation). The error was in thinking that science is sufficient for knowledge, that what Scott calls “theoretical cognition” is all there is to knowledge, let alone to human affairs. So literalistic Christians read their scripture like it’s a grand unified theory, and analytic philosophers busy themselves with pseudoscientific problems that they have no business worrying about. Let scientists take care of science! Let them blast dogmas and show us the new form of Socratic irony: by humbly admitting that our intuitions and traditions are unreliable revealers of cold, hard natural facts, scientists merely hypothesize rather than pontificate, and then they design experiments to let the world have the last say on the matter.
That’s not what philosophy and religion are for. That’s certainly not what religion has been for for many thousands of years, and it’s not the essence of Western philosophy since Socrates acted as a Christlike gadfly rather than a protoscientist (a Presocratic Greek philosopher). Philosophers needn’t pretend they have a nonscientific handle on what the raw facts are with respect to anything whatsoever. Science is obviously by far the most reliable guide through the natural facts. Instead, regardless of what pomposity may be found in the academic institution of Western philosophy, philosophers’ proper tasks are to interpret the facts and to give them meaning without succumbing to the temptation of religious faith. Philosophers thus must synthesize reason with the imagination and with a vision of what should be done, given the facts.
Oh, did you think that such interpretation and social guidance have nothing to do with knowledge? That knowledge consists of a dry, disordered list of facts? No, scientific theories are maps (i.e. models) and maps are useless without a goal to arrive at some destination or other. Scientists tell us what the facts are. Philosophers and religionists tell us what to do about those facts. Philosophers do so by arguing or by using powerful, literary rhetoric. Religionists do so by issuing commandments and appealing to power and fear. Knowledge consists of a coherent map of the world. It begins in the individual as an experience of conscious recognition, as the brain matches its sensations with its store of memories, focusing its attention and marshaling its abilities to conceive of alternatives and to plan for the future, based on that understanding of the past and on its moods and other animal drives.
Knowledge is thus pragmatic, which means it has ethical and social components, as S.C. Hickman seems to imply in his remarks on science and as I’ve been trying to get Scott to see. But Scott’s having none of it. The point isn’t just that science is tentative. Science is tentative because that’s what works, but the notion of workability means that scientists want to succeed at something. And what would that something be? They want a map of reality to facilitate our traveling to some preferred destination. (In my view, that overall destination is plainly the world’s artificialization.)
Scott, you say the solution is to think of heuristics and ecologies, and of coping with new tools, rather than atavistically worrying about actualizing the self. I don’t know how to think of your solution except in more or less pragmatic/instrumental terms. Again, however you wish to interpret the meaning of “heuristics,” the word simply means in this cog sci context an experimental, tentative, trial-and-error approach, which is quite consistent with the pragmatist’s assumption that we should use methods that work and discard those that don’t. The alternative to a heuristic, or a rule-of-thumb, is an algorithm, which in this context would be something like a religious creed or philosophical dogma.
Is my kind of existentialism a throw-back to obsolete vanities? No, my model of the self is drawn from the sciences as well as from philosophy and religion. The fact is that “ecology” is dualistic in that it sets up an opposition between the organism and the environment. That opposition is most naturally spelled out in terms of what the organism wants which the environment doesn’t always provide. Thus, biologists find themselves speaking of an organism’s beliefs and desires. Likewise, the notion of a tool that solves an environmental problem makes sense in the pragmatic, semi-intentionalist context, since the problems in question are subjective. The universe has no objective problems. It doesn’t care if organisms succeed or fail, live or die. Some aspect of the environment becomes a problem only given the organism’s narrow, self-interested viewpoint. The biologist’s gene’s-eye view doesn’t eliminate those distinctions—or if it does, and biological processes are purely undead mechanisms, then talk of “tools,” “problems,” or “working methods like heuristics” would be utterly misleading. There would be no such tools or problems or methods as such, just as living things would be metaphysically identical to dead things. And if you can’t even speak of tools or problems, Scott, doesn’t eliminativism make you a mystic who must affirm that we have no idea what science is or what’s really going on anywhere (since there would likewise be no meanings, truths, goals, or any significant difference between subjects and objects)?
I do think it’s unseemly to kick academic philosophy while it’s down, by the way (re: the opening post). The North American humanities and the arts in general are in big trouble. No one cares much about them, because the internet provides art for free and the duties of citizenship have been simplified to cater to dumbed-down Western expectations. So to heap scorn on professional philosophers is akin to bullying. You don’t see philosophers having as great a hand as scientists in potentially destroying the ecosystem.
Mike raised the question of where the telling of fictions enters the existentialist’s picture. It’s a long story, but I’d draw on the aesthetic perspective as well as on the religious idea that myths sustain us on an emotional level. That doesn’t mean we should pretend, say, that professional philosophy is working well when it’s not. When our myths don’t align well with the facts, we should search for new inspiring meta-stories. The stories give us direction in life so that we can use our scientific maps well.
I’m pretty skeptical of a number of moves you make here, Ben, not the least is the suggestion that skepticism amounts to mysticism! The attempt to characterize my critique as “bullying” is simply rhetorical, as you well know. Feelings aren’t at what’s issue here: the question is what to do going forward, and whether the project you advocate has the kinds of wheels you claim it has. I actually think your strategies here clearly express the problem you face, which is one of biting the empirical cognitive bullet, and yet still arguing the (attenuated) indispensability of traditional (nonempirical) discursive forms. I can see how this or that person taking a leap of faith might report success, but then I think far more people would report as much taking that leap of faith with Eckhart Tolle–or Christ, or whomever. Should we “search for new inspiring metastories”? And if so, what kind of “metastories” should they be? How are we supposed to arbitrate between them? Eloquence? Emotion? Your posts are always keen to home in on the reader’s sense of exceptionalism, to vindicate the notion that a certain sensibility, cultivated in just the right way, that some souls might be just smart enough to ride out the white-water future in their armchairs. This is the new age strategy as well. Ersatz confidence for sale.
You keep switching to the offensive, Ben, but this problem isn’t wedded to BBT or heuristic neglect (which merely provide a speculative way to understand the problem). How is it you aren’t peddling more of the same? Sops for the discomfited, only geared with easy-to-rationalize jargon.
On a BBT diagnosis, your dilemma is inevitable, and almost certainly insuperable so long as you persist in the ancient game of applying intentional cognition to the theoretical problem of intentional cognition. Your ‘metastories,’ far from distinguishing us from animals, reveal us as animals, as creatures trapped by ancestral reflexes, floundering in radically transformed ecologies.
Scott,
Are you saying skepticism entails eliminativism? That’s news to me. A skeptic might, for example, be pragmatic in using concepts she doesn’t take seriously, because of their social benefits, whereas an eliminativist thinks the unrealistic concepts should be discarded.
The bullying comment was in reference to the opening post, to “Dead World,” as I said, which I take it wasn’t written by you. You’ve also piled onto academic philosophy, but your criticisms of it have been more focused.
You say I bite the empirical bullet but then turn around and use the traditional forms of discourse. Meanwhile, I say that biting the empirical bullet doesn’t entail eliminativism (although I’ve sometimes gone along with that implication for the sake of argument). Thus, I point out that your discourse and thus the cognitive scientist’s, not mine, seems to resort to what you call “the ancient game of applying intentional cognition to the theoretical problem of intentional cognition.” I’m sure you’ll agree that “theory,” “tool,” “solutions to problems,” “heuristic method,” and even the “ecological” split between organism and environment have easy intentional meanings.
The question is whether they have nonintentional ones. If so, you’re obligated to lay them bare. If you don’t, that shows your eliminativism leads you into a kind of Zen-like mysticism, which is to say your conclusions force you to say nothing about the effects of science, because anything you’d say would be misleading. Just say what a tool is, without employing the notion of the tool-user’s goals. As soon as you start talking instead about just the neurological causes and effects, you lose any sense that the item in question is a *tool*. The word becomes misleading. And if you can talk only about mechanical causes and effects as such, there is no apocalypse, no problem and hence no need for any solution, and no “question of what to do going forward,” let alone an urgency to such a question requiring that those words be put in italics. If there are only causal mechanisms, as such, there’s no autonomy, so there’s no question of picking between possibilities. That’s the empirical bullet you want to bite, but you keep using quasi-pragmatic/instrumental terms which that bullet should have shot to pieces. So it’s the pot, kettle, black dynamic, I’m afraid.
Science reveals that we’re animals, but history plainly shows we’re anomalous ones. We’re poised between animalism and a transcendent state of godhood. I’m not talking about metaphysical transcendence into an immaterial plane. I’m talking about withdrawal into a lifestyle that seems normal to its participants, but which objectively looks quite insane and potentially self-destructive. I’m talking about life on the cultural plane rather than the biologist’s ecological one. It makes a big difference whether the environment is natural or artificial. If it’s artificial, you get a bizarre feedback loop that makes the inhabitants arrogant and narcissistic. You get the phenomenon of decadence, the spoiling of animals so that some literally live as the gods that populate our myths. You get kings and plutocrats and their myriad worshipers. Yes, there are alpha rulers in plenty of animal species, but they use their power only for the narrow evolutionary purposes of hoarding the food and the females, because their brains prevent them from thinking much beyond the present moment, whereas human alphas (e.g. robber barons) remake the planet. Again, not one word of this paragraph is inconsistent with anything scientists say.
Regarding what I say about leaps of faith, you’re not quite getting the point. My primary point is descriptive, not prescriptive. I’m saying none but perhaps autistic individuals are actually hyper-rational. Most of us take leaps of faith when it comes to our answers to normative questions, to choosing our life goals, and so forth. The prescriptive question is just whether we should choose to put our faith in something else when our creed comes into conflict with reality, and if so, what is there left to believe in? This latter question clearly confronts Christians and Muslims, since their faith is in conflict with naturalism. What I aim to show, following Nietzsche, is that secular humanists likewise face a conflict between naturalism and their early modern metanarratives.
I think you’d agree up till that point. But you think somehow science itself must provide the life-sustaining answer. I don’t think that’s remotely plausible. The science says we’re animals. Thus we have a nonrational side, which we express as a need for art and faith. As Kant explained, reason is cursed to attempt to go beyond itself, to try to uncover the nature of the whole of reality. Reason fails, but because we’re animals rather than robotic hyper-rationalists, we’ll settle for an artistic, emotional kludge. And then I say that some kludges are better than others.
How to evaluate the meta-stories? With aesthetic standards and attention to whether a story stirs your guts. What do I care if the majority is moved by tripe? The fact that they’re in the majority means they’re betas, which in turn means they haven’t exercised the introverted omega outsider’s objectivity or skill at looking inward. They don’t know what they’re doing, but are merely following fads. In any case, who says a myth needs to work for everyone equally? There can be existentially authentic individuals who are moved by different kinds of art. My questions are prior to such choices. I’m raising the possibility that most people haven’t even gotten started in this process of being respectable animals, because they don’t see the conflict between naturalism and monotheism or liberal secular humanism.
‘Meaning skepticism’ is generally used synonymously with eliminativism. But the ability of intentional cognition to optimize and power of optimization has never been an issue here, Ben. The issue has to do with theoretical intentional posits, like ‘authenticity’ (let alone ‘godhood’). But you know this.
If you bite the rhetorical bullet, admit that your posits are simply more commodities among others, to be consumed or eschewed by whomever, then we agree. But then why pretend to have a ‘solution’ to anything? Why pretend you’re doing anything different than Eckhart Tolle, not offering ‘authenticity’ (because there is, high-dimensionally speaking, no such thing) so much as the ability to deem oneself ‘authentic’ when convenient to do so?
Otherwise, I have no idea whether science will provide any ‘life-sustaining’ answer, only that science is drawing the curtain down on our traditional attempts to provide ‘life-sustaining’ answers. I hope scientific cognition will show a way through, because it is greedily eating up all credibility otherwise. You’re the one who’s arguing the problem isn’t so bad as I think!
Scott,
I am aware we’ve agreed that intentional cognition can have non-epistemic effects. So the question is whether intentional terms are useful for cognitive purposes. That’s why I addressed the question, “Oh, did you think that such interpretation and social guidance have nothing to do with knowledge?” And it’s why I asked for the definitions to show that your posits (tool, solution, problem, heuristic method, ecological split between organism and environment) are genuinely nonintentional, that they don’t fall back on the representational notions of beliefs and desires. Still waiting on those definitions.
As I recall, maybe a year ago now we reached this same place in our discussions and you admitted you couldn’t show that the new cog sci picture of the self is wholly non-intentional, because you could only leave it to the future science to supply the “content” to the anti-intentional image of our nature. Is this still your view? Do you concede that when you speak of something that’s supposed to be an alternative to the referent of the folk notion of the self (e.g. when you speak of heuristic tools solving environmental problems in the evolutionary context), our knowledge of that alternative is still so incomplete that you’re forced to fall back on intentional notions even in spelling out the science that’s supposed to be wiping the floor with intentional psychology? If you do agree that this is so, I think it’s important to realize that your argument for BBT amounts to a wager. You’re betting on science and on the anti-personal trends in cog sci research, because science has been much more successful than philosophy or religion. But if that’s what you’re really arguing, you’d be open to the charge that you’re committing a red herring fallacy, since you’d be applying a scientistic standard, comparing science, philosophy, and religion based on science-centered criteria for success. In fact, this is what you do in “Flashlight Philosophy.” I’ll talk more about that in a comment on that article, but since you reliably raised the issue of “theoretical posits,” we can focus on that term.
I suspect you’re equivocating on “theoretical.” You know there’s a strict sense of “theory,” which is relevant only to science since having a theory in that sense makes the work scientific, and then there are all the looser senses of the word. Strictly speaking, a theory is either “a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena” or “a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural and subject to experimentation, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.” In the weakest cases in which the word’s meaning has been degraded, a theory is merely a “contemplation or speculation” or “a guess or conjecture.”
Do you see the problem? First of all, notice that the strict definition (from Dictionary.com) says a theory’s propositions are regarded as “correct,” so that there’s an intentional, representational notion built into our idea of science itself. But leave that aside. If when you’re speaking of the theoretical status of philosophical statements, you’re speaking of “theoretical” in the strict sense, you’re open to the charge of scientism, since there’s no reason to expect nonsciences to be doing what science does. (Did you read “When Philosophy Lost its Way” on the NY Times Stone philosophy blog? It goes into the history of this scientism: when philosophy became an institutional profession, it held itself up to scientific standards and that’s been its downfall.) But if you’re speaking in the looser senses, it follows that the theoretical status of intentional psychology is perfectly satisfactory, since its statements would be entitled to be mere speculations or guesses. You yourself say at the end of Flashlight Philosophy that philosophers engage in mere “post hoc guesses.” OK, so those philosophical statements would be theoretically valid in the weak sense which happens also to be the relevant one.
Now, were you to provide the eliminativistic definitions, they would, of course, be pantomimes. That is, they wouldn’t really be definitions, meaning their content would enable us to see there’s no such thing as content in the first place. The definitions would show that we’re really something other than minds with meaningful inner states such as beliefs that represent facts and goals that motivate us to change some facts. The definitions would be meaningless even as they’d be susceptible to the intentionalist interpretation: they’d succeed in correcting our beliefs, by getting at the truth to which we’re blind because of the poverty of introspection. So their status would be quite paradoxical.
Finally, you say, “If you bite the rhetorical bullet, admit that your posits are simply more commodities among others, to be consumed or eschewed by whomever, then we agree. But then why pretend to have a ‘solution’ to anything?” Remember that “solution” is your term. I’ve never said on my blog that my philosophy solves a problem. That’s your ecological language. But I think your point is that my philosophy is either relativistic and subject to arbitrary taste, like any work of art, or it claims for itself some privileged epistemic status. And you’re saying I haven’t shown that the philosophy would be entitled to the latter. For example, I have no principled way of saying my philosophy is better than Eckhart Tolle’s. As I say in my article on Tolle, which you commented on, I do indeed have a case against Tolle. His brand of Eastern mysticism isn’t naturalistic, since it posits mind as ontologically fundamental. My philosophy posits undead matter as fundamental. So there’s that.
And I’d add that Tolle is much more successful than I am, so he faces temptations of power which are liable to corrupt him and degrade his ideas and his artistic vision. It’s hard to be authentic when you’re rich and famous. This is why Kurt Cobain killed himself, for example, because he could no longer pretend that everything sucks and thus he could no longer produce authentic grunge music after he became rich and famous. That’s another advantage my philosophy has: it hasn’t yet had the chance to be corrupted by the vicissitudes of fame and power. It’s an authentic expression of a viewpoint, with no ulterior motives. Of course, Tolle’s ulterior motives would be to sell books and speeches and guest appearances, and to pick up groupies.
Anyway, there’s a sense in which I’m happy to agree my philosophy is no better than any other. From the ultimate, tragically aesthetic perspective, all our pastimes are in vain, since nothing will be left of our species and there will come a time when no one remembers any trace of us. It will be as if we’d never lived and struggled. This is what makes life absurd. But science is also in this boat right alongside philosophy: all of our “solutions” and artworks are objectively futile, given their negligible role in the cosmic course of things. But short of that lofty perspective, which negates technoscientific power just as much as philosophical wisdom, I can appeal, as I said, to aesthetic standards and to the existential standard of personal authenticity. The latter is just the ideal of being free of self-delusions and other misrepresentations. I try my best to understand the facts at the philosophical level, meaning that instead of being content with the empowering scientific theories themselves, I try to assimilate that empirical knowledge to a vision of what we ought to do about the facts. That’s where philosophy and religion add to science. And again, those additions are relevant to cognition, because they make scientific maps useful by supplying worthy destinations.
“I am aware we’ve agreed that intentional cognition can have non-epistemic effects. So the question is whether intentional terms are useful for cognitive purposes. That’s why I addressed the question, “Oh, did you think that such interpretation and social guidance have nothing to do with knowledge?” And it’s why I asked for the definitions to show that your posits (tool, solution, problem, heuristic method, ecological split between organism and environment) are genuinely nonintentional, that they don’t fall back on the representational notions of beliefs and desires. Still waiting on those definitions.”
And round and round we go, right back to the tu quoque! I know I’ve linked this piece for you several times, now, which provides thumbnails of all the intentional phenomena I’ve explored. But the bigger point, of course, is that the tu quoque begs the question. What is it I’m helping myself to again? Different cognitive systems adapted to different kinds of problems? Or is it intentionality qua representation, belief, desire, or what have you? I have explanations, which is why my eliminativism escapes the abductive (or ‘baby with the bathwater’) critique. But I don’t need them. Why should the eliminativist have to explain the very things the intentionalists have never been able to explain to have a coherent theory? It makes no sense.
The bottom-line is that you have no definitive way of distinguishing your discourse from Eckhart Tolle’s. The degree to which you recognize that is the degree to which you recognize the severity of the bind the undead world puts us in. There’s no Nietzschean bootstrapping, here, no ‘aesthetic authenticity.’ Once again, none of this concepts solved anything before we found ourselves on the exponential cliff, so why should we think it’s anything but a sop now?
I don’t have the answer, but then neither do you. All I know is that intentional posits are an eroding currency on your view as much as mine. ‘Spending them the right way,’ the ancient answer, is no longer a viable answer. We need to find something new.
Personally, I am very happy to be getting out of philosophy. I think I’ll enjoy philosophy more when I don’t have to do it for pay. Nursing ftw!
What were you up to before, BF?
Im still teaching philosophy! But i hope i can start nursing soon!
Ben,
I think I could see various merits in your reply to Scott above, BUT…perhaps I’ve been too influenced by the Kellhus characters fiction, but I think what you’re describing is vulnerable to being measured by science and and manipulable as such, at a technically fine level (unlike the relatively crass ways we try to sway each other in day to day life). To just come from what you’re describing is starting to be like going onto the internet without a firewall or virus protection, I think. Perhaps this is why you keep thinking Scott into scientism – you think he’s thinking only in it’s terms as if it’s the greatest, when really he’s taking it seriously as you do a threat – not an ideological threat, but a mechanical manipulation threat to the mind/brain. I mean, if we were talking nukes, it’s not scientism to be afraid of nukes and see them as a threat. Perhaps what you take to be Scotts scientism is just him afraid of mental nukes, so to speak?
Callan,
I think you misread me regarding scientism. I didn’t say Scott’s being scientistic. I said “late modern philosophy and fundamentalist religion” are so. If they’re failing, they’re failing with respect to scientific standards of success (i.e. the standard of telling us what the literal, bare facts are), whereas those standards have no business being applied to such disciplines, regardless of what the misled participants (the philosophers and the religionists, not Scott) may say.
If, as you say, Scott’s not concerned with ideological threats, but only with threats to the mechanical manipulation of the mind/brain, I’d say that’s oxymoronic. Unless the notion of “manipulation” is implicitly pragmatic/instrumental, which means that contrary to eliminativism, it would permit the use of “beliefs” and “desires,” the mechanical discourse of causality leaves no room at all for the notion of any threat to anything. You get the notion of a threat when you’re thinking in terms of an organism’s subjective viewpoint, which requires that the organism have desires which are in danger of not being fulfilled, because of an uncooperative environment. If subjectivity is just an illusion and all that exists is the world of natural objects, as such, there’s no such thing as a threat. Nor are there any tools, problems, solutions, or even organisms-in-opposition-to-environments, in the ecological sense. All such things seem to fall back on the traditional, intentional concepts which are inconsistent with eliminativism. If those concepts aren’t intentional, I invite someone to demonstrate this with the pertinent definitions.
Aww, Ben, you’ll be shouting ‘Performative contradiction!’ next!
I don’t like the word ‘zombie’, but I’m going to use the word for the sake of drama (ie, for the sake of attention keeping). And you’ll have to indulge me for a few hundred words.
Okay, so there’s a zombie. It makes sound waves which to you and me sound like the words “If subjectivity is just an illusion and all that exists is the world of natural objects, as such, there’s no such thing as a threat.”
It makes further sound waves which to you and I sound like the words “All such things seem to fall back on the traditional, intentional concepts which are inconsistent with eliminativism. If those concepts aren’t intentional, I invite someone to demonstrate this with the pertinent definitions.”
I raise the pistol to it’s head, from which it makes a withdrawing motion that takes longer to complete than it does for me to complete the trigger pull.
The projectile enters it’s skull and engages a dispersal program, causing only light kinetic damage to the zombies wiring from entering. It engages the wiring and through nanotech, locates certain wires and connects the wires together with other live wires/wires with a constant or near constant flow of electricity running along them – sending electricity down wires that, if they had been observed closely before, had little to no electricity sent down them.
These wires extend from the zombies head to motors in it’s limbs, of course.
The zombie is soon observed applying knives to other zombies, severing various parts of the other zombies and/or italic scenes from the book ‘Neuropath’. Prior observation of the zombie showed it to have no history of these acts beforehand.
Zombie #2. Zombie #2 makes the sound waves as Z1 generated as above, which to you and I sound like the same words from above. We will assume the zombies processing capacity is far greater than a mere Eliza program. It’s not using rote sound generations.
What do you say to Z2 to make it cease repeating the sound waves from above or other sound wave combinations which to you and I sound like words which are much the same?
If one were to project an ‘attitude’ onto the zombie, the attitude one might project is that “It seems to think it works from subjective experience and that the thing it works from can’t be eliminated by eliminativism. Despite it being a zombie. An automaton. A series of atoms in a certain configuration.”
Rather than me having to convince you in regards to concepts and intentionality, I’m curious what you would do to ‘convince’ the zombie? To make it stop saying the words from above – your words, obviously, which being a thoroughly elminativist object, seemingly the zombie should not be taking on such an ‘attitude’. I’ll play out the responces of the thing as best as I can predict, for back and forth purposes, if you like.
It’s all a long winded way of me reversing the roles – instead of me having to convince you of anything, I’m curious as to how you would convince a device out of making soundwaves that, to you or my ears, proclaim it as coming from intentionality?
Or do you feel the device is coming from some kind of rock solid position – ie, it’s not the device making a claim, it’s you, in saying it does not come from any kind intentionality, that is making the claim?
No, you don’t feel the device is coming from a rock solid position – maybe you feel it is making the claim – or even just making sound waves?
So why should I feel you are coming from a rock solid position where your concepts are intentional and it is I that is making the claim of it being something else?
I call it ‘claim judo’, where you attempt to reverse someones position so instead of them questioning your claim, they become the claim maker and have to justify their claim. Like in judo where you turn someones attack energy into your own attack. I’m pretty sure I’ve caught Scott doing this one time, as well.
But how about we don’t do claim judo and you just treat it you are making a claim to the zombie and the zombie gets to treat themselves as coming from a rock solid position, as far as their sound wave output could be taken as?
Where do you go from there, when you can’t bank on the rock solid status quo, Ben? Your argument will be my argument. Any failure to argue with the zombie will also be my argument.
Callan,
Your thought experiment is kind of baroque so I’m not sure what to make of it. I think it comes down to you trying to say that the eliminativist and the intentionalist have equal burdens of proof, so that the presuppositionalist tactic is misplaced and can be parodied. As I see it, the question is whether there’s a default, indispensible mode of human communication. Scott says the illusion of personhood is persistent, because it’s due to innate limitations and predilections. So we should expect the eliminativist to appeal, at the first-order level, to intentional terms in making her case that such terms are all flawed. This is in fact what happens in our every use of English words in Three Pound Brain, since the presupposition in using a natural language is that the words have meaning. That’s what they teach you in grade school. The eliminativist wants to say that scientific methods present a very different model of the self, one which compels us to look at such a naïve assumption with irony. Objectively speaking, in the real world, there’s no such thing as meaning.
Now, that last sentence employs symbols that are naturally assumed to have meaning. So this appears to be a version of the Liar’s Paradox. For eliminativism to be coherent or at least useful as a non-self-negating product of human effort, the eliminativist must surely at least sketch the impersonal facts, albeit using something like tainted English. To do that, she must refer to things which aren’t obviously personal in nature. She must speak of objects and mechanisms, not meanings and values. If it turns out that the eliminativist’s theoretical vocabulary falls back on intentional notions, after all, this can be due to the necessary limits of English, since that language is tainted by commonsense, or it can be due to the incompleteness of the eliminativist’s case against intentional psychology. How are we to know which is the culprit? At the very least, this failure would provide reasonable doubt against eliminativism. We’d have reason to suspect that a purely objective, mechanistic discourse doesn’t account for all the facts of human behaviour after all. And the irony would be reversed, since eliminativism would seem to be resting on that which is anathema to it.
If you want to know how I’d show that a zombie is just a zombie, I’d study its behaviour, note that it eats brains even as its body is decaying, and so I’d conclude that it conforms to the pop cultural convention of the fictional character of zombies. If the zombie starts protesting that it’s alive and that it has an inner life, I’d say, “So why are you dead, then? Why do you have no heartbeat even while you’re walking hungrily towards that little boy?”
The upshot is this: Is it unfair to ask the eliminativist for genuinely eliminativistic definitions of her key terms? I don’t think so. Is there a comparable imperative for the intentionalist to show that her key terms are genuinely intentional? Not really, because of the above asymmetry. It’s eliminativism that tends to fall back on intentional notions, not the other way around. It’s not as if we speak English and then always stop and wonder what we’re doing since all words are meaningless. We take our natural language for granted because it works very well. That’s what makes it our default mode of communication. Science does outright refute many of our dogmas and it also makes us uncomfortable with some of our assumptions, by placing them in an impersonal context. But that doesn’t entail eliminativism, especially when we can’t even say yet what’s replacing the eliminated discourse without appealing to that very discourse at the theoretical, second-order level itself.
“So why are you dead, then? Why do you have no heartbeat even while you’re walking hungrily towards that little boy?”
The zombie makes noises, which to your or I sound like the words “Ha! This is your proof I don’t speak from an intentional stance!? You refer to a big lump of MUSCLE as if it’s necessary for the intentional? Such bizarre eliminativism on your part, to think a muscular chunk in my chest somehow relates to the intentional stance I most clearly have! What, do you think people who go through heart transplants somehow cease being intentional beings for a few minutes while meat is cut and swapped? Huh? Really!? Absurd! How could you EVEN THINK the intentional hinges on such rude materialism!?
And the boy? Now you merely try to outgroup me, make me a villain AS your method of disproving I am an intentional being, full of artistic potential! Such a false disproof! What the hell does villainy have to do with the intentional stance? With qualia? What, do villains not have intentional stance in your world? How cartoonish is that!? And I am not even a villain – it’s not like it’s a prince, after all! I’m reasonable!”
Figured there’d be no reply. When there’s a zombie that clearly has no intentionality, making soundwaves that insist it has intentionality, you’ve got no argument.
Your only move is to move away from the thing that dispells you. Kind of like a sorcerer in Scott’s books moving away from a tear of god.
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Great posts, Ben. Scott is right that you can’t bite the bullet and continue to argue the same way but then all you’re doing is not biting the bullet but trying – needlessly – to appear a hardcore man of science as if taking Science seriously entails BBT, eliminativism or anything else many philosophers – who don’t think themselves such – claim Science entails. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. You can’t help yourself and neither can they.
Callan,
If you imagine it, it must be real, or is close to real, or must be taken seriously? Serious question.
Do you think the inability to know what is a zombie is proof that we are zombies? Seems, it could just as well be that the ability to tell what a human is has – inexplicably – atrophied. I suspect epistemic problems can just as well be an indication of a problem with our faculties rather than evidence that we’re zombies. I talk to Ciri all the time. I don’t fall in love even when she says she loves me. If I do, is that proof that she is no different from human beings or is there something wrong with me? Am I deluding myself or just realizing that we’re all undead?
And even more curiously, do we extend these epistemic conundrums to all animals? From what I can tell, not many animals [ which we are, I think] are perpetually confused about what constitutes their species but maybe its all that intentional cognition making me overconfident. Maybe, what we should do is out the brakes on all this as some have said – we’re learning that our blissfully unaware animal friends and ancestors are living the life – utterly convinced and unconcerned about the knowledge that they’re only machines, each but a point in a vast and empty vessel of ‘causality.’
But I digress…
I still have to ask: If Ben happens to be a zombie, what sense does your requests and attempt to turn the question around make? How would the zombie pretend ” as if” it were not? But more importantly, if you stipulate that a zombie would have the exact same conversations, it makes no difference to the actual argument being had *as arguments*. If I saw two unsuspecting, every day human zombies are arguing and one says “I can fly ” and the other says “No, that it not possible because of X, Y, Z ” if the first replies with “You could be a zombie – how would you know?” by the standards of normal discourse I’m supposed to believe that the second zombie has won the argument? Or even made one? Normally, I’d say that it makes very little sense because it is irrelevant to the reasons given and argued but then I might be a zombie too….so what do I know,
The zombie makes sound waves, which sound like the following words to you or I
“He’s just going to say you didn’t engage me and that you avoided having to disprove my statement of my clear and obvious intentionality is a proof of how you can only stonewall but not disprove any false claims of intentionality. Which is stupid of him of course…because I am an intentional being! And I mean really you didn’t argue with me on that, PRECISELY BECAUSE YOU AGREE I AM AN INTENTIONAL BEING! ME, THE ZOMBIE!
Look, I’m saying the words right now – how could anyone or anything for that matter that can say those words be wrong about their intentionality! Well, sure Ciri could be made to those soundwaves that to you or I sound like ‘I have intentionality’, but we both know Ciri is wrong – I’m going to totally avoid convincing Ciri she is wrong. Just like you avoided convincing me. Because it’s obvious we two have intentionality, but she doesn’t – she’s not even a she. Just machinery.
Buddy, we’re two peas in a intentional pod – now bring that big brain of yours over here and give me a hug!”
How would you argue the zombie out of that?
That you do everything to avoid engaging the claim – it shows so much. Yes, I do think you just play the game of insisting everyone is making a claim they have to prove and you just stonewall, acting as if you make no claim at all.
But the zombie makes sound waves which to you or I sound like the insist he is an intentional being.
And you’ve got fuck all in terms of arguing otherwise, Sinha. The only thing you’re really arguing from is ‘You need me, Callan! You can’t afford to upset me!”.
I really can afford to upset you – either I’m going to get the uncomfortable facts through to you by doing so, like an inoculation comes on a nasty needle or your intentional stance stuff is going to help fuck over the (human) world, in which case I don’t need you. My only care is where I could have gotten through to you on the matter somehow, but fumbled the ball.
Or alternatively the supernatural world exists and your intentionality is part of it, alive and well.
And yet you’ve got fuck all to argue against a zombie that says it is an intentional being?
But here it comes, no doubt – more ‘you have to convince me – as I’m coming from the status quo and it’s you with the claim, not I’.
The zombie reverses your supposed status quo position – you have to convince it about your intentional stance, as in convince it it doesn’t have any.
And you have no argument for this. You’re used to playing the status quo card and turning your nose up at ‘claims’ otherwise as your only support for your status quo. You have no actual arguments for your status quos existence, only a series of dismissals of anything that questions it.
You’re treating it that if you can poke holes (to your own satisfaction) in all claims against your position, it means your position is true. This is a fallacy. You can poke holes the way you like, but it doesn’t mean you’re right. Show some evidence rather than just ‘Ha, I looked derisively at your arguments – therefore mine is proven correct!’
I’m not sure if you’re being deliberately ironic, Callan. Especially, your second reply. And I mean that seriously, not derisively.
Either way, I’m confused as to why your thought experiment is ‘evidence’ and mine isn’t. Why do I need to refute an imaginary scenario with empirical facts ( if that’s what you’re asking)? You don’t seem to think performance is enough so what exactly is the engagement you’re asking for?
Why should I grant that what enables me to distinguish, say, a real dog from a paper mache dog is nothing at all? I know how actual dogs move, bark, smell but I don’t know everything about them or hell how each particular sense works. I don’t see why this lack would entail that all the criteria just listed are bogus.
But yet you stipulate straight away that performing actions ( ‘arguing’ for example) is nothing at all and can be mimicked wholesale w/o issue. So, apparently, you’re asking for some sort of metaphysical, deductive proof that ‘arguing’ is a living human thing. However, if I point to human action and argue that no dead brain has ever, or ever seems likely to engage in conversation, you just imagine away and then dismiss it, right?
What empirical facts would dissuade you from just stipulating that a zombie voiced them? Seems disingenuous.
And you avoid it again, Sinha! I say your emperor is naked, you just try and investigate my claim and thus avoid investigating your own claim that he is clothed. You’re engaging in fallacy when you think dismissal of other peoples claims makes your own claim true!
Why do I need to refute an imaginary scenario with empirical facts?
Fucking exactly! Except you don’t realise this is MY position to begin with! Why do I have to refute your imaginary intentionality scenario with empirical facts??
I have reversed the roles with the zombie example, so you can see my position – and indeed you do. You wonder why you should put up with it. I wonder why I should put up with it, to begin with! And guess what, with all the money going to science rather than philosophy, the world is not putting up with philosophy!
You don’t seem to think performance is enough so what exactly is the engagement you’re asking for?
No, you’re back to playing the zombie, not talking to him. The zombie seems to respond to your expression of disbelief when it made the soundwaves that sound like “I am an intentional being!”. It then goes on to make soundwaves that sound like “You don’t seem to think performance is enough so what exactly is the engagement you’re asking for?”
However, if I point to human action and argue that no dead brain has ever, or ever seems likely to engage in conversation, you just imagine away and then dismiss it, right?
How can you say this with a straight face? The zombie clearly moves, clearly makes sound waves – you wouldn’t even say Ciri is a dead mother board, but here you’re attributing a dead brain to something that is clearly moving?? How does that make sense to you for even a moment?
The zombie makes more soundwaves, that sound like “What empirical facts would dissuade you from just stipulating that a zombie voiced them?”
It is disingenuous! You’re correct – the zombie is playing the game of dismissing all claims it’s not an intentional being and treating that dismissal as if that proves the intentionality status claim it makes.
What emperical facts would get around the zombies disingenousness? How do you crack the shell of someone/something who/which bloody mindedly just wants to deny anything that breaks their/its stated belief?
Would you like to admit you can’t talk the zombie out of it? Or will it be more “Why should I bother with this scenario by ‘arguing with facts’?”. Why? Because you expect me to step up with facts when I engage your intentionality claim. And no, dismissing my claims clearly doesn’t verify your own as true – where are the facts on your own intentional claims? The zombie performs just as much as you do.
I think it’d make a lot more sense in the end if you just admitted you can’t talk the zombie out of it’s claims it’s intentional. Every time you avoid pitching any kind of argument, it just shows you feel you’d fail (and rightly so – the zombie is bloody minded and running off sheer fallacy. It’s intentionality claims are perfectly naked). What becomes disingenuous is when you wont acknowledge it between us. It’s the elephant in the room.
Ok, man. You win. I can’t convince the zombie.
Cheers. I’ll go ahead and bow out here.
Now that’s disingenuous. When you want to tell me I’m wrong, you expect me to stick around – but if you start to find yourself being somehow wrong, you rage quit.
Do you continually go around expecting others to stick around for your claims, but you don’t stick around for anyone elses? And it almost seems you’re trying to play a ‘I’ll be the bigger man’ card at the very same time! Yep, you’re bigger than this – you saw through it all with a cool, calm and very unbiased gaze.
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